Saturday, May 31, 2014

Put simply,
Christians believe God created us and our world. We can remain open as to how
God accomplished it. I find no scientific argument that disproves God’s
creation. With that assertion in mind, I now turn to one such counter-arguments:
that genetic determinism proves neither we nor Adam have the ability to make
free choices. To that argument I now turn.

God is free. We, as bearers of God’s image, possess freedom.
We as creatures are called to respond to God, to choose right over wrong. For
that, we need freedom. At least that is our tradition…. But are we really free?
Determinism—the philosophy that everything we do has been programmed by forces
beyond anyone’s control—has supplied a recurring motif in the history of ideas.
In the early nineteenth century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace stated baldly:

An intelligence knowing, at a
given instance of time, all forces acting in nature, as well as the momentary
position of all things of which the universe consists, would be able to
comprehend the motions of the largest bodies of the world and those of the
lightest atoms in one single formula, provided his intellect were sufficiently
powerful to subject all data to analysis; to him nothing would be uncertain,
both past and future would be present in his eyes?

This suggests that everything, from a decision to marry to
the outcome of the battle of Waterloo, has been fated.

Today
determinism is back in a new form and tied with the revolutionary discoveries
in genetics. The world-famous scientist, Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA,
has laid down the gauntlet for those who defend the existence of human freedom.
He comments on the title of his well-known book:

The Astonishing
Hypothesis is that “you,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more
than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules. As Lewis Carrolls’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but
a pack of neurons.”

If Crick is
right, then we have some problems with our sense of freedom. In fact, it does
not exist. And without freedom, we also have problems establishing ethics. The
Christian tradition has located the ability to transcend our human, bodily
limitations through the notion of the soul.
Unsurprisingly, Crick subtitled the book, “The Scientific Search for the Soul.”
Theologians have used “soul” and “spirit” for this component of the human
being. For simplicity’s sake, I will stick with “soul.” The soul offers us
freedom and the ability not just to be determined by our body. How then can we
respond to Crick?

Of the many
ways to refute his position—or most forms of determinism—the easiest is this:
it is self-defeating. In a playful phrase, the biologist and theologian, Arthur
Peacocke has labeled the position “nothing buttery.” (Remember Crick’s
rephrasing of Alice: “You’re nothing but
a pack of neurons.”) Take Crick’s argument to its conclusion. If our thinking processes are “nothing
but” the interaction of bio-chemicals in the brain, then we have no way if what
we know is true. It just is. We might as well call the size of our feet or the
color of our hair “true.” They are simply facts, neither right nor wrong. This
makes Crick’s wonderful discoveries “nothing but” the movement of electrical
charges in his predetermined brain. But in fact, we know that some
genetically-influenced behavior patterns—a tendency toward violence or
alcoholism—are not beneficial. Crick does not offer any means for assessing or
responding to them.

Thankfully, we are not stuck with genetic
determinism—or any determinism for that matter. Our faith has long taught that
we are not just our bodies, but that our soul offers us transcendence from
bodily processes, giving us freedom. Scientifically-minded theologians talk
about the soul as a capacity for transcendence and freedom rather than a
“thing” that can be located through scientific experiments. In addition,
Crick’s arguments rest on reductionism,
the notion that the workings of any system can be reduced to its smallest
parts. But reductionism misses the point. Ted Peters, a theologian constantly
exploring the effects of science on belief, has summarized it this way:
“Determinism at the genetic level does not obviate free will at the person
level. Genetic determinism just like all conditions of finitude place each
person in his or her particular situation, readying the person to exercise
freedom.” Our genetic makeup set the boundaries for our choices—not choices to “do
anything” (as we often want freedom to mean). Our genetic structure is the
chord structure over which we improvise our lives.

A coda: I think this is what C. S. Lewis was getting at when he criticized the scientific atheism of the 1940s. The specific reason
Lewis rejected the “Scientific Outlook” lies in the self-defeating nature of
the two claims “we can think” and “nature is all there is.” Here we come to a
key theme: the Scientific Outlook asserts the truth and
reasonableness of its claims without thereby providing a place for reason. Or
as he phrased it:

If
minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and
biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot
understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance
than the sound of the wind in the trees.

Lewis called this atheistic science, "the Scientific Outlook." He conclude that it tries to fit in reason in an irrational—or maybe arational—world. Lewis
concludes that this move is self-defeating.

As an alternative, Lewis discovered in his own life (around
his conversions in 1930 and 1931) something he argues here: Belief in a Creator
God who endows humanity with reason makes entirely more sense. The divine Logos
creates human reason. The primary Cause undergirds all secondary causes. Lewis
says that is why he does not believe in the “Scientific Outlook,” but instead
believes in Christianity, which includes reason and science. As he closes the
lecture, he writes,

Christian
theology can fit in science, art, morality....
The [atheistic] scientific view cannot fit
in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I
believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I
see everything else.

Lewis believed that Christian theology gave grounds
for reason and thus reasoning about what is true. It’s a vision of life that
makes sense of all experience, and therefore it makes sense of science.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Why care what C. S. Lewis had to say about science, a topic
that his filled the past few posts? In one sense, this theme could seem to
border of the trivial. Lewis—though a renowned scholar in his field of Medieval
and Renaissance literature—had no particular insight into scientific
discoveries. His inability to grasp mathematics, which almost caused him not to
be accepted at Oxford—is well-known. We might decide the subject has little to
offer and move on.

But
I demur. Why? Lewis, as an intellectual
historian, engaged science because he knew its effect on, and contributions to,
Western European culture. When Cambridge University asked him to deliver the
inaugural address in 1954 for the newly-formed chair he was to occupy there, he
spoke on the historical epochs in western thought. He noted that the greatest
change occurred as Europe became “post-Christian” and particularly, not when
science arose in the age of Copernicus and Galileo, but when western culture
took on the metaphor of the birth of the machine. “Between Jane Austen
[1775-1817] and us [1954],” Lewis comments, “but not between her and Shakespeare
[d. 1616] … comes the birth of the machine.” The west had displaced a more
organic or sacramental view of the world with that of clock, or more generally,
a machine. And Lewis notes that with this concept emerging from scientific
thought arose the notion that old is inferior to the new.

For
today, I have only two notes: This demonstrates that it isn’t often science
qua science that determines its effects on culture. It’s more often the
worldview that emerges. It also tells us something about 2014. Does this “birth
of the machine” lead us to Ray Kurzweil and transhumanism, particularly the
idea that we will achieve a technological singularity in which artificial intelligence
can upload an entire human brain/mind into an immensely powerful computer? I
suppose I wouldn’t be the first to note that once we make human beings a machine,
it’s not a far leap that they become infinitely improvable and therefore
upload-able.

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

I’ve been thinking about C. S. Lewis
and science recently, and this week I’m teaching my Lewis class and exploring his
famous September 1931 discussion with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson where he realized
that Jesus is the “true myth.” This conversation moved Lewis from life as a
broad theist to a confessional Christian. It also affected his writing and the
way he presented a defense of specifically Christian faith—that is to say, the
faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

As
I’ve written in other posts, there were three specific arguments that Lewis
made against the dominant scientific thought of his day: the self-defeating character
of materialism, the desire for something beyond this world as a pointer to God,
and the law of right and wrong in human beings that indicates the existence of a
moral God. These three led to his famous argument that appears in Mere Christianity: the “trilemma”—that
Jesus is liar, lunatic, or Lord.

So
now to Lewis and science: Can this be seen as a “scientific” argument? Or
perhaps better, is this a dialogue with science? So far as I can discern, this
latter question divides into two. Because Lewis is effectively asking us to
make an historical judgment about the character of Jesus of Nazareth, it can be
phrased this way: Can science comment on history? Secondly, is it scientific to
think about such an ultimate category as God’s identity being determined by one
event (albeit an event of thirty plus years of Jesus’s life)?

I’ll
start with the second question. Generally, science deals with the general laws,
and so to reason scientifically would be not to think that something as
ultimate as God could be discerned through a particular historical event. And
that word “historical” in my last sentence pretty much answers the first
question: certainly there are forms of science, like archeology, that can make
judgments on historical events, but at the end of the day, the “science” we
usually mean—natural, and sometimes behavioral, sciences—are structurally
different than the science of history. (And now I’m using “science” to mean mainly
“academic discipline.”)

For
that reason, I’d conclude (at least for the moment) that Lewis sought not to
contradict good science with his trilemma, but he moves beyond the bounds of
what we usually call scientific thought.

But
then again, should science (at least, the natural sciences) be the arbiter of
every truth? Lewis, we can be sure, would have responded with a quite confident
No. And that thought might lead to another, later post…